Month: July 2008

Four Star Surrogate

by digby

I hope they bring him back into the fold. The hell with a bunch of hanky wringing hissy artists. This guy is necessary.

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Pressing The Press

by digby

Bob Cesca at Huffington Post notices that the press has all adopted a new word: presumptuous:

And today, the word of the day in the corporate press is… presumptuous. Used in a sentence: Senator Obama is being presumptuous during his trip — acting all presidential and dignified. How dare he be presidential while running for, you know, president. Presumptuous. During the live CNN web feed of the Berlin address, an anchor used it to describe the event. Joe Klein used it in a blog post today. Of course Joe attributed it to racist voters rather than very serious reporters — racist because it’s presumably a synonym for ‘uppity’ and we can’t accuse the press of such awfulness. And Candy Crowley used it in her post-address analysis on CNN. That’s a lot of coincidences. “Presumptuous” must really be a popular word. Odd that it’s being used so often by people who want Senator Obama to win.

AP: “In a speech that risked being seen as presumptuous…”

TIME Magazine: “capable to become the Commander in Chief of a superpower — without seeming presumptuous…”

The National Journal: “He is well aware voters here at home might see that as presumptuous…”

Washington Post: “Whether by the end of this week he will be seen as presumptuous or overly cocky…”

Chicago Tribune: “That means walking the fine line between looking presidential and appearing arrogant and presumptuous…”

Boston Globe: “plus the growing sense in some quarters that the presumptive Democratic nominee is getting a little presumptuous…”

Can you feel the wanting-Obama-to-win love radiating off your computer screen? No?

The reality is that positive coverage of any Democrat is limited and temporary for fear of networks and newspapers either being accused of liberal bias or being tossed out of the very serious barbeque loop. Regardless of whether the Democrat, in this case Senator Obama, is having a good day, it’s somehow unethical to report on such good news for too long without deliberately concocting an antidote to appease the far-right.

This is important to keep in mind (particularly in light of this poll, which the right will use to bludgeon the media into compliance.) The pre-existing narrative of the “liberal media” is still in very good working order, particularly among the media itself, and it will be put to use at some point to create hostile press for Obama. The only question is if it will happen before or after the election.

This is why it’s not a good long term policy to have a puerile media that covers politics like it’s a Britney Spears stakeout. Even if, on a rare occasion, they temporarily swoon over a Democrat, the longstanding storyline of the “liberal media” will be deployed and they will eventually overcompensate in the other direction.

Here’s another example of the Republicans playing the refs today:

Republicans are, smartly, seizing upon this report from Der Spiegel (which has become a must-read this week):

SPIEGEL ONLINE has learned that Obama has cancelled a planned short visit to the Rammstein and Landstuhl US military bases in the southwest German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The visits were planned for Friday. “Barack Obama will not be coming to us,” a spokesperson for the US military hospital in Landstuhl announced. “I don’t know why.” Shortly before the same spokeswoman had announced a planned visit by Obama.

The optics here are not good: Obama has time to get in a workout and give a speech to a crowd mostly comprised of Europeans, but can’t be bothered to visit American troops wounded in action recovering at a military hospital.

Obama’s explanation strikes at much of the criticism he’s gotten from McCain and the GOP.

Keep in mijnd that the GOP does not do this stuff for a knock out. They operate on the death of a thousand cuts. Little criticisms, relentlessly played, dribbled out over time designed to create a running theme. This one is obvious: elitist, aloof, and — presumptuous. That last carries quite an amazing amount of freight — presumptuous, uppity, doesn’t know his place. It applies neatly to any Democrat who deigns to lead Broderville but the historical, subliminal American memory that attaches to such a word when the person in question is black is particularly powerful. (I smell the mark of Rove on that — he’s really good at stuff like this.)

The media are going to feel the necessity to prove their professional neutrality, their greatest self-delusion, and the only way they can ever do that effectively is by demonstrating to conservatives that they aren’t liberal. They do that by carrying their themes to the public.

The good news is that the Obama campaign has a very good handle on the image side of campaigning, which goes a long way toward balancing out skewed (and ultimately unhelpful) press commentary. The pictures from Berlin, in that golden sunset light, were masterful. I do not believe that the sight of Obama, smiling, confident and intelligent, speaking to that European crowd will hurt him in America. It’s been eight years since we had a president who the rest of the world admired and I think all but the most die hard wing nuts would like to see the US respected again. It was well done.

But it’s a never ending battle. We’ll see if the “presumptuous liberal black guy” (who couldn’t be bothered to visit the wounded troops) idea catches on. But even if it doesn’t, these things are filed away, used later to pressure the press and add another layer of “doubts and questions.” And “doubts and questions” about Obama are the basis of the McCain campaign.

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Political Participation – The Real Fascism

by dday

Jesse Taylor at Pandagon had a remarkably insightful piece today about the wingnut carping over the Barack Obama speech in Berlin, the media reaction, and his popularity generally. I really think this is important to understand. The right has always held a goal of minimizing political participation; normally this is done through voter suppression, onerous voter ID or ballot access laws, and generally disenfranchising those for whom it is hardest to engage in the process. Now they’ve taken it a step further, basically planting the seed that ANY participation whatsoever, not just voting but showing up for a rally or working a phone bank or donating money, is toxic and inherently fascistic. Because their deficit in this election year is enthusiasm, they’re trying to make such support and excitement untenable. Behold:

But what (author of Liberal Fascism Jonah) Goldberg has done is provide intellectual cover for a growing meme: Obama is the leader of a new fascist revolution. Why, you may ask? Well, it’s all got to do with the defining downward of fascism towards a gooey puddle that virtually anyone not a movement conservative can step in.

The Goldbergian view of fascism (and I’m sure he’ll deny it, which will then be followed by a criticism of my argument, which will in turn be fascist, which will in turn be the exact point he was trying make) is that the marriage of any measurable popularity whatsoever to any state action whatsoever outside the boundaries of Reaganite conservatism is de facto fascist. The point was never to explore fascism or provide an analysis of the phenomenon that cast new light on it – a feat of which Goldberg was summarily incapable – but instead to provide the exact utility we see on display now, and provide a way to brand any popular Democrat or liberal as the handmaiden of evil.

In a way, Goldberg lucked out (but he’s used to that) – Obama’s popularity and McCain’s plodding campaign provide the perfect stand-in for his argument. A Republican candidate with any stature, any devotion from the base, anyone who’s invested in seeing him elected for reasons that extend beyond his party affiliation, and it’s entirely ruined. A boring Republican running a bad campaign (Bob Dole, Gerald Ford) inevitably creates a fascist Democrat, not by anything they’ve said or done but by the simple act of showing up and not being a dumbass.

Yep. And because McCain is running such an awful campaign, conservatives must then rationalize that there’s something deeply wrong with the popular and competent campaign that Barack Obama is running. And so he becomes a leader of a fascist movement. His creation of fliers for his Berlin event in the language of the country where he’s appearing becomes proof. So does the location of the event in front of a Nazi monument. And his head is tilted in profile in the picture – just like Hitler! Because electoral history has shown that imitating Hitler is a surefire vote-getter. Those supporters are being lured by music and food they have to pay for into worshipping this false idol who will lead us down a path to destruction.

But that’s all subtext, of course. The idea is to create the connection between large crowds and enthralled supporters in the 1930s and in the Obama campaign today. And that is meant to induce feelings of revulsion and shame, not just in those voters who are more passive and see these images on television, but among the very participants themselves. Going to an Obama rally? You’re a mindless pawn. Send him money? You are funding a cult. Work on his behalf? You have drank the Kool-Aid and are pathologically creepy.

This pervades the media conception of the Obama candidacy, too. Never in my life have I seen such a concern troll statement like this from a political reporter.

Candy Crowley on CNN: Barack Obama was, indeed, awesome in his Berlin speech tonight, but watch out! Americans might decide he was a little too awesome.

Obama has to be “careful.” He mustn’t be too presumptuous. He has to scale back with the soaring rhetoric and the inspiration and the winning, you see. It’s decidedly unfair of him to run a decent campaign and soak up all the media attention at the expense of the guy who shows up at the German sausage restaurant on the same day as the Berlin speech.

The biggest fear of the GOP is that the great silent majority, the people who don’t get involved in politics and don’t even vote, are spurred to consistent action. This manifests itself in the concern that they’re losing the new media war, which they’ll surely throw billions at in the next decade. But there’s another element of this project: marginalization. Here’s an example: yesterday Color of Change and MoveOn put together a great protest of Fox News’ racist attacks on Obama, delivering hundreds of thousands of petitions and enlisting rapper Nas, who actually has a new track called “Sly Fox” about the channel, to be their spokesman. So Bill O’Reilly had to respond.

Fox officials are not only attacking Nas for selling his album (which already topped the charts), some are likening the anti-racism activists to the KKK. MTV reports that Bill O’Reilly also responded, deriding protesters such as MoveOn as “the new Klan” with “a radical left agenda.” He continued:

“The latest smear from Move On is telling their Kool-Aid-drinking zombie followers that Fox News is smearing Barack Obama and is a racist concern. Of course, that’s a lie. This broadcast and FNC in general have been exceedingly fair to Senator Obama. … But in order to intimidate anyone from criticizing Obama in any way, Move On is playing the race card.”

It’s a fairly rare coalition that can include Nas AND the Klan, but that’s the world according to BillO.

Being a member of MoveOn for almost its entire 10 years, it’s pretty clear to me that they represent a kind of passive liberalism which engages people online who otherwise might not participate.

MoveOn’s success (and, indeed, its limitations) is powered by its appeal to today’s non-shouters. Though its politics are in many ways the opposite of the Nixon silent majority’s, they share a disposition. They are people not inclined to protest but whose rising unease with the direction of the country has led to a new political consciousness. For citizens angered, upset and disappointed with their government but unsure how to channel those sentiments, MoveOn provides simple, discrete actions: sign this petition, donate money to run this ad, show up at this vigil. “Before I joined MoveOn,” says staffer Anna Galland, “I was organizing in Rhode Island doing faith-based antiwar activism. In March 2003, MoveOn had put out an action alert for a vigil against the Iraq War. There were 500 people on the steps of the Capitol, and I remember thinking, ‘I know all the activists in the state; where did all these people come from?’ I think many people have a MoveOn moment where they look around and realize that this organization has managed to tap into a much broader range of people than they might have seen at past activist events.”

MoveOn is essentially a conduit for ordinary Americans to collect their voices and mobilize political power. Color of Change is doing the same thing in the African-American community. They aren’t the Klan – they’re actually you, your friends and neighbors. They have fairly baseline liberal beliefs, nothing shocking. This kind of activism isn’t going to change the world – clicking “send” isn’t the final step on the road to salvation – but it’s a gateway into more civic engagement and participation. And when it’s demonized as “the Klan” or some outpost on the dirty hippie left, the goal is obvious – to strangle activism at the very outset. If MoveOn is smeared and made radical, there’s not very much hope at REALLY engaging people (That’s why it was so damn stupid for the Democratic Congress to condemn MoveOn for the “Betrayus” ad last year). And it’s the same with the more intense activism of the Obama campaign, from their MyBO social media tool to the volunteer events and the like.

We have to recognize this and understand it. There is a very concerted and completely ahistorical effort to make “fascism” synonymous with “popularity.” As Jesse Taylor notes:

On the one hand, it’s an awful abuse of the concept of fascism, disrespecting the millions upon millions of people whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed because of the dream of nationalist identity and corporate power uber alles. On the other hand, it is remarkably entertaining to see them try to figure out how Barack Obama’s favorite ice cream flavor plays right into the hands of the fascist dream.

Entertaining, but also dangerous. They’re taking a hip campaign and trying to make it radioactive. Those silent masses could easily be turned off by something they are browbeaten into considering the work of wild-eyed cultists. It’s absurd, but it can be effective if we don’t head it off. With growing numbers of the politically active and engaged, the Republican Party withers and dies. This is their latest suppression tactic.

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What The Hell?

by digby

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Thursday announced joint appointments to a landmark ethics review board that for the first time will allow private citizens to review allegations against members.

Still, four out of six members of the board for the newly created Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) will be former members of Congress, including former CIA Director Porter Goss (R-Fla.), who will serve as co-chairman.

Goss? Ethics? Is this a joke?

This is ridiculous. They rehabilitate these corrupt ideologues with jobs in the government, apparently so they can continue to be members in good standing of the Village. Can’t business and industry take care of these people? They bought them while they were in office and I can’t see any reason why the taxpayers should pay them, or even give their imprimatur to any of their activities. It’s ridiculous. Goss was a disaster at CIA and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near government again.

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Don’t You Dare

by digby

The ACLU has put together an action to try to stop this dangerous notion of the congress “declaring war” on Al Qaeda and terrorism. You can sign up here:

Tell Congress: Reject Endless War and a Torture Cover-Up President Bush and Attorney General Mukasey have a plan to make the entire globe — including the United States itself — a “battlefield” where the president decides who will be locked up forever. The legislation Mukasey is pushing would also subvert the Constitution, authorize indefinite detention, and permanently conceal the Bush administration’s systemic torture and abuse of detainees. We can’t take for granted that Congress will reject the Bush/Mukasey plan. We must meet this outrageous proposal with an immediate wall of protest that says to Congress: “Don’t you dare.”

Tell Congress to reject a new declaration of war and the Bush/Mukasey plan to subvert the Constitution. Or, read more first.

I think we all know what an awful policy this would be. If the United States is to ever regain the tiniest bit of its reputation for trustworthiness and decency, it has to reject this entire regime. This whole thing makes us less safe, not more.

But let’s get shallow and talk about the politics of this. The Republicans couldn’t be more obvious than to lay this minefield before they get out of office, giving themselves all the tools they need to hamstring every initiative that isn’t fully approved by their most fervent warmongers for years to come.

It is a huge mistake to let them revive the GWOT as an organizing principle for American foreign policy. Bush’s Iraq debacle managed to discredit the right wing’s patented flogging of the boogeyman as the dominating narrative of American politics. People no longer take for granted that we are under siege from enemies and must “sacrifice” everything to keep the babies safe. Now is the moment for Democrats to offer a different vision of American strength and leadership. Declaring unending war will put us right back in the pre-invasion mindset, as if Iraq never happened and we are fighting The War of The Worlds.

And it will put Democrats back in a perpetual defensive crouch. Endless war and “fiscal responsibility” are political straight jackets that keep the progressive agenda cramped and unrealizable, thus ensuring that conservatism can make its big comeback, once they’ve rested up from all the raping and pillaging.

I wrote about the necessity of the Glorious GWOT a while back (along with many similar screeds over the years) and have been relieved to to have to do so in the past year or so. It would be a disaster to see this make a comeback simply because the Democrats fail to see the larger implications of furthering these themes:

One of the things thats driven me nuts over the past few years is this reflexive portrayal of the GWOT as the most dangerous and challenging in world history. They have from the beginning behaved in a way that I think history will see as panicked and overwrought. As a nation we behaved with much more calm and deliberation when we were much more seriously threatened in the past. These last few years were not our finest.

Still they audaciously insist that the forty years of the cold war were a cakewalk compared to what we are dealing with now. Indeed, many of them also believe that WWII was nothing to the horrors we face today. (Chris Hayes wrote a great piece about this for In These Times some months back.) Bush still repeats his completely absurd line about how the oceans used to protect us and he’s just dumb enough to actually believe it. Paul Kennedy, a professor of history and the director of international security studies at Yale discusses this in today’s LA Times:

IT WAS FUNNY, in a grim sort of way. Last week, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates responded to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s polemical attack on the United States by remembering the 50-year Cold War as a “less complex time” and saying he was “almost nostalgic” for its return.

Gates should know. He himself is the quintessential Cold Warrior, having served nearly 27 years in the Central Intelligence Agency (facing off against the likes of Putin, who was for 17 years an agent in the foreign intelligence branch of the Soviet KGB). So we should take him seriously when he suggests that the problems of 20 or 30 years ago were in some ways more manageable than our current global predicament.

Nor is he alone. There is a palpable sense of nostalgia these days for the familiar contours of that bygone conflict, which has been replaced by a much more murky, elusive and confusing age.

The argument goes as follows: The Cold War, although unpleasant, was inherently stable. It was a bipolar world — centered on Washington and Moscow — and, as UC Berkeley political scientist Kenneth Waltz argued, it was much more predictable than, say, the shifting, multipolar world of the 1910s or 1930s, decades that were followed by calamitous wars. Yes, it’s true that the two sides possessed masses of nuclear weapons aimed at each other’s biggest cities, but the reality is that they were constrained by a mutual balance of terror.

I see this as being different phenomena. The first is the unreconstructed cold warriors who are both rewriting history and adhering to their long standing hysterical position that the sky is always falling and the only thing to do is fight, invade, bomb or some other form of violence. They have never seen any use in diplomacy, international law, sophisticated containment strategies or anything else that requires finesse and subtlety. It’s always been about might makes right with these people. They were frustrated to no end by anyone who tried something different and that includes St. Ronnie who was roundly denounced for taking yes for an answer when the Soviets saw the light.

One would have thought that the outcome of the cold war would make them embarrassed to ever offer an opinion again, but they simply airbrushed the facts to suggest that Ronald Reagan’s welfare for middle aged white males (otherwise known as the 80’s defense buildup) somehow meant they had defeated the Soviets on the battlefield. But it wasn’t truly satisfying and they were looking for a proper boogeyman to hate from the moment Gorbachev and Ronnie made nice.

Then 9/11 happens when they are in charge and they have a chance to do it the way they always wanted to — by roaring and flailing about like a wounded Giant under the ridiculous assumption that this will scare the enemy so much he will just give up. They are facing this complicated threat with all the sophistication of early man trying to scare off a big predator.

The doughy pantload generation of wingnuts, on the other hand, thinks it’s some sort of game and they are the star players. They yearned to be “part” of something momentous — but from a distance, like you are when you are watching movies about war and heroism and identify with the main characters. No need to give up your Milk Duds just to enjoy a good bloodbath. They are writing an exciting plotline that has Islamic terrorism somehow so uniquely dangerous that it has surpassed WWII and the cold war and is more like something out of science fiction: “Star Wars” or “War of the Worlds.” To these people, national security is cheap pulp fiction.

Of course it is all nonsense. After acknowledging that today’s world is complicated and difficult, yadda, yadda yadda, Kennedy continues:

So is it true? Was the Cold War era, on the whole, a safer era? Ponder the following counterarguments:

First, however tricky our relationships with Putin’s Russia and President Hu Jintao’s China are nowadays, the prospect of our entering a massive and mutually cataclysmic conflict with either nation are vastly reduced.

We seem to have forgotten that our right-wing hawks argued passionately for “nuking” communist China during the Korean War and again during the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1954. We also have apparently forgotten — although newly released archival evidence overwhelmingly confirms this — how close we came to a nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Likewise, we’ve forgotten the shock of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which prompted then-German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to ask, “Is this the new Sarajevo?” a reference to the outbreak of World War I. And who still remembers 1984-85, when we were riveted by Jonathan Schell’s argument in the New Yorker that even a few nuclear explosions would trigger such dust storms as to produce a “nuclear winter”?

Those were really scary times, and much more dangerous than our present circumstance because the potential damage that could be inflicted during an East-West conflagration was far, far greater than anything that Al Qaeda can do to us now. No one has the exact totals, but we probably had 20,000 missiles pointed at each other, often on high alert. And the threat of an accidental discharge was high.

None of today’s college-age students were born in 1945, 1979 or maybe even 1984. None lived with those triangular signs proclaiming their schools to be nuclear bomb shelters.

To recapture those frightening atmospherics these days, university professors must resort to showing Cold War movies: “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Fail Safe,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “The Hunt for Red October,” “Five Days in May,” “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.” Students look rather dumbfounded when told that we came close, on several occasions, to World War III.

Yet what if, for example, Josef Stalin had prevented American and British supply aircraft from flying into Berlin in 1948-49? Phew! The years 1945 to, say, 1990 were horrible on other accounts. China’s Mao Tse-tung’s ghastly Great Leap Forward led to as many as 30 million deaths, the greatest loss of life since the Black Death. The Soviet Union was incarcerating tens of thousands of its citizens in the gulags, as were most of the other members of the Warsaw Pact. The Indo-Pakistan wars, and the repeated conflicts between Israel and its neighbors, produced enormous casualties, but nothing like the numbers that were being slaughtered in Angola, Nigeria, the Congo, Vietnam and Cambodia. Most of the nations of the world were “un-free.”

It is hard to explain to a younger generation that such delightful countries as Greece, Spain, Portugal, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Poland and Czechoslovakia (to name only a few) were run in those days by fascist generals, avowed racists or one-party totalitarian regimes. I am ancient enough to remember the long list of countries I would not visit for summer holidays; old enough to recall how creepy it was to enter Walter Ulbricht’s East German prison house of a state via Checkpoint Charlie in the late 1960s. Ugh.

Let us not, then, wax too nostalgic about the good old days of the Cold War. Today’s global challenges, from Iraq to Darfur to climate change, are indeed grave and cry out for solutions.

But humankind as a whole is a lot more prosperous, a great deal more free and democratic and a considerable way further from nuclear obliteration than we were in Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy’s time. We should drink to that.

No thanks to the rabid right which has been lobbying for a nuclear meltdown (and global domination, let’s face it) since the end of WWII. It is a worldview that has almost nothing to do with actual events or facts on the ground. It reached its zenith with Bush, but they will never go away. They are fearful, insecure people whose temperament and ideology create a need for them to believe that they are warrior heroes in spite of all evidence to the contrary. They are the last people on earth who should be leading a powerful nation in a time of great challenge. Talk about putting the inmates in charge of the asylum.

The cold war was very good for conservatism. It was their raison d’etre, the defining principle by which they could dominate politics and ensure that the liberal program was always under seige. They would like to continue their run through the next few years by making the GWOT similarly dominant. It’s to be expected that the Islamic fundamentalists would be happy to join with them in that project — it is, after all, mutually beneficial. It’s not in our interests as a country or as a political movement to help them do it.

Unless we want to see Obama turn into LBJ with Afghanistan as Vietnam, we’d better get a grip on this one right now. It may be the last chance we have.

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The Editorial Muse

by digby

Whoops:

Some of the reporters traveling with Obama were surprised upon landing to discover their editors in something of a frenzy. The reason: Drudge is using terms like “chaos” and “mob scene” to describe Obama’s visit early this morning to the Western Wall. But that’s not the way the pool saw it. (When I asked pooler Jeff Zeleny of the NYT about the Drudge version, he was puzzled and conferred with the other poolers and emailed me back: “No mob scene. Not even close.”)

These press organizations spend big bucks to send reporters along on trips like these and yet their world still revolves around some schmuck in Florida who serves as a conduit for right wing propaganda. After all these years, they still believe him. And the funny thing about it is that while they rely heavily on a guy who’s only relationship to real journalism is the fact that he wears a Walter Winchell fedora, they spend an inordinate amount of time denigrating bloggers, among whose ranks he more logically belongs.

In other news, Barack Obama doesn’t give the reporters on his trip any nicknames and sounds like an intelligent, well-informed, confident human being when asked a wide range of questions. How can he possibly win? (I would definitely enjoy having a Venti non-fat latte or an orange juice with him — a beer too, for that matter.)

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The Surge Began In March 1867

by dday

So to follow John McCain’s logic, everything positive that’s ever happened in Iraq is part of the surge, even those occurences that began well before the actual increase in troops, which is, you know, the surge, as defined by the US military and political leaders and pretty much everybody who’s ever talked about it. And everything negative is part of the “failed strategy” of which he was the number one critic. So, bad stuff – McCain knew it was bad and spoke out. Good stuff – McCain personally directed it.

McCAIN: … Prior to that they had been going into places, killing people or not killing people, and then withdrawing. And the new counterinsurgency ‘surge’ entailed going in, and clearing and holding, which Col. MacFarland had already started doing. And then of course later on, there were additional troops. And Gen. Petraeus has said that the surge would not have worked and the Anbar Awakening would not have taken place — successfully — if they hadn’t had an increase in the number of troops. So, I’m not sure, frankly, that people really understand, that a surge is part of a counterinsurgency strategy, which means going in, clearing, holding, building, building a better life, providing services to the people, and then, clearly, a part of that, an important part of that, was additional troops to ensure the safety of the sheikhs, to regain control of Ramadi, which was a very bloody fight, and then the surge continued to succeed in that counterinsurgency.

REPORTER: So when you say ‘surge’ then, you’re not referring to just the one that President Bush initiated, you’re saying it goes back several months before that?

McCAIN: Yes.

Of course, this is completely illogical. If the surge is merely counterinsurgency strategy, then we’ve been surging since 2005 when COIN was implemented, with mixed results, mind you. But since the elite media has very little understanding of Iraq themselves, and since any attempt to clean up the historical record yields the charge that they are undermining the work of the troops, this will probably go unchallenged. Or maybe challenged, by the Obama campaign, but left for the audience to figure out on their own.

Yet what’s really striking here is not the gaffe itself, but the willingness of McCain to alter reality to fit the gaffe into a new worldview. This is all very familiar, and after all devaluing facts is a key element of conservative strategy, given that those pesky facts have a well-known liberal bias.

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Younger Than Springtime

by digby

I love this. Via Maha, I see that right wingers are now arguing that Obama is too young to be president. The man is 47 years old. Old enough to be a grandfather. (But hey, I’m only four years older than him and I’ve been feeling pretty damned old lately so this is good news. I feel young again!)

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, argue[s] that in choosing between different interpretations of the Constitution, we should select the one that will produce the best consequences. This method too suggests that Obama should be understood to be constitutionally barred from serving as president by reason of his age. We have had three presidents out of 43 who were younger when they took office than Obama would be on Jan. 20, 2009: Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy and Theodore Roosevelt. All of them committed serious rookie blunders because they were too young.

Clinton’s first two years in office were marked by a series of major overreaches, from his gays in the military plan to Hillary’s failed health-care proposal. In 1994, the American people responded by putting Clinton on a tight leash with the first all-Republican Congress in 40 years.

Kennedy is widely known to have blundered in his 1961 summit in Vienna with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Kennedy’s show of weakness led to the Cuban missile crisis and brought the world to the edge of annihilation.

Roosevelt engaged in gunboat diplomacy with Latin American countries such as Panama that tarred America’s reputation in that part of the world for the next 100 years. We are still living with the legacy of T.R.’s youthful foreign policy excesses.

Well heck, at least none of them sat on their asses while being warned daily that the nation was going to be attacked and then invaded a country that had nothing to do with it. Just the sheer scale of the blunders … oy.

I think, frankly, we should stop worrying about age and gender and race and the rest and start thinking about IQ. Bush is quite clearly on the lower end of the scale, no matter what age he is, and I’m seeing some quite serious signs that McCain’s lousy record at the Naval Academy wasn’t due to his carousing.

I’m not saying you have to be a genius to be president but you should have to meet some kind of intellectual thresh hold to be considered for the job. We’ve see how badly it can turn out when you ignore the fact that the president is a blithering idiot, no matter what the age. I’ll take a thoughtful, intellectual, young person over a hidebound, rigid, intellectually deficient older jackass any day. They are, after all, the ones who have fucked things up to kingdom come.

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Unpardonable

by digby

D-Day wrote about this the other day, but I think it’s worth further discussion. There’s chatter about Bush issuing pre-emptive pardons to all those involved in the illegal interrogation and wiretapping regime of the last four years.

As the administration wrestles with the cascade of petitions, some lawyers and law professors are raising a related question: Will Mr. Bush grant pre-emptive pardons to officials involved in controversial counterterrorism programs?Such a pardon would reduce the risk that a future administration might undertake a criminal investigation of operatives or policy makers involved in programs that administration lawyers have said were legal but that critics say violated laws regarding torture and surveillance. Some legal analysts said Mr. Bush might be reluctant to issue such pardons because they could be construed as an implicit admission of guilt. But several members of the conservative legal community in Washington said in interviews that they hoped Mr. Bush would issue such pardons — whether or not anyone made a specific request for one. They said people who carried out the president’s orders should not be exposed even to the risk of an investigation and expensive legal bills.“The president should pre-empt any long-term investigations,” said Victoria Toensing, who was a Justice Department counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration. “If we don’t protect these people who are proceeding in good faith, no one will ever take chances.”

I think there are better than even odds that Bush is going to do it. After all, his father did it in 1992 and nobody seemed to hold it against anyone. Indeed, we’ve already seen the kind of arguments that the establishment is liable to make, such as this fatuous screed about Scooter Libby being a “fallen soldier” on the Iraq battlefield, (one case where the accusation of having disrespect for the troops is absolutely spot on.)

You’ll recall how usual suspects gathered around their convicted criminal friend and declared that he was a “good person” who didn’t deserve to go to jail:

“This is not a man who deserves to go to jail in any sense of the word,” said Kenneth L. Adelman, a former Defense Department official and longtime friend of Mr. Libby, who stayed at his Colorado vacation home before his trial. “Whatever he did wrong, he certainly paid,” Mr. Adelman said, referring to Mr. Libby’s resignation from his prominent position and his public humiliation. “This is a good person who served his country very well and is a decent person,” he said.

But you have to love Victoria Toensing’s explanation as to why it should be done — a woman, by the way, who believes presidents should be impeached for sexual dalliances but potential war criminals should be pardoned in advance. And why does she think this? Because if they are forced to face charges “no one will ever take chances.” We can’t have that, can we? Why the whole system of the rule of law would be compromised. Oh wait …

There is one person Bush cannot pardon. Himself. (Or can he?) If we lived in a just world, there would be an understanding that if Bush pardons these people it is guaranteed that he will personally be prosecuted for the crimes for which he pardons them. As chief executive there should be little problem proving that he is ultimately responsible for anything they did.

Of course, here on planet earth we are far likelier to see a bipartisan village consensus to let bygones be bygones and allow these people to continue their lucrative careers and set the table for the next time they slither their way back into power. (And remember, each time, they up the ante.) It wouldn’t be seemly to see these people have to do time for their crimes. After all, they are “decent” and “good” and excellent dinner companions.

Considering the realities of village life, what could we do, starting now, to make pardoning these people come at a cost that is too great even for Bush? I honestly don’t know that they have any shame and I believe they think they will be vindicated by history. Without a new administration and congress pledging to get to the bottom of these crimes, I just don’t know what’s to be done. Pardons or not, it would appear that they are going to get away with it again.

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Could You Be President?

by digby

Take the quiz:

Global knowledge1. The split between Sunni and Shia, the two main branches of Islam, is approximately how many years old?
a. 700 years
b. 1,100 years.
c. 1,400 years.
d. 3,200 years.2. The gross domestic product real growth rate of China for 2007 is:
a. 5.5%
b. 11.4%
c. 16.1%
d. 20.7%3. Roughly speaking, the respective populations of Palestinians and Jews in the West Bank are:
a. 1.9 million and 700,000
b. 2.3 million and 275,000
c. 2.75 million and 540,000
d. 3 million and 300,0004. Scientific experts were “stunned” in 2007 to learn that the rate at which the Arctic polar ice cap is melting could leave the north pole completely ice-free as soon as:
a. 2018
b. 2060
c. 2121
d. 2030Domestic Knowledge5. By what year are Medicare expenditures expected to surpass Social Security expenditures?
a. 2028
b. 2014
c. 2082
d. 25256. In what percentage of the roughly 3,100 counties in the United States is there at least one legal abortion provider?
a. 31%
b. 28%
c. 13%
d. 56%7. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have a hand in about what percentage of mortgages in the United States?
a. 30%
b. 65%
c. 40%
d. 50%8. How many Americans live below the official poverty line?
a. 26 million
b. 37 million
c. 42 million
d. 53 millionEveryday life9. At the end of 2007, what was the average price in the US of a gallon of milk?
a. $3.87
b. $3.35
c. $4.26
d. $4.4110. What’s the manufacturer’s suggested retail price for a Chevrolet Malibu LS Sedan (base model)?
a. $23,385
b. $27,138
c. $19,345
d. $17,21111. What’s the average annual cost of in-state tuition and fees at a typical state university – say, the University of Missouri?
a. $14,380
b. $16,050
c. $24,700
d. $20,60012. In 2007, the average yearly premium for an employer-sponsored healthcare plan for a family of four was what?
a. $12,100
b. $9,900
c. $18,450
d. $14,200American history13. List these four historical incidents in chronological order from earliest to latest:
a. The Monroe Doctrine
b. The Indian Removal Act
c. The Treaty of Ghent
d. The Missouri Compromise14. Who wrote the Federalist No 10?
a. John Jay
b. Gouverneur Morris
c. Alexander Hamilton
d. James Madison15. When Truman secretary of state Dean Acheson told senator Arthur Vandenberg that he wanted the case made to the American people to be “clearer than truth”, he was referring to the case for what?
a. The Berlin Airlift
b. The Truman Doctrine
c. The formation of Nato
d. The Korean war16. Affirmative action in the United States was initiated by:
a. An act of Congress
b. A supreme court decision
c. A presidential executive order
d. A policy enacted by a consortium of state university systemsGeneral well-rounded human being-ness17. In the Old Testament, who was changed into a pillar of salt?
a. Job’s wife
b. Job
c. Lot’s wife
d. Esau’s wife18. Who is credited with the discovery of double-helix DNA?
a. Difford and Tilbrook
b. Watson and Crick
c. Sly and Robbie
d. Marsters and Gellar19. Which of these teams has never won a Super Bowl?
a. The Minnesota Vikings
b. The Kansas City Chiefs
c. The St Louis Rams
d. The Pittsburgh Steelers20. Simon, Randy and Paula are:
a. The Kingston Trio
b. The real names of Peter, Paul and Mary
c. The judges on Dancing With the Stars
d. The judges on American Idol

Answers here.

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